I still don't see the point of RAID 0'ing a large amount of drives when you can't even utilize the bandwidth in everyday applications. You can only write as fast as the other guy's HDD is going and how fast the network connection is, so really it's plain stupid of him to put 12 HDDs in RAID 0 if nobody else is going to give him the bandwidth. He may as well not even RAID them to be honest. He'll get the same amount of storage. I have yet to see a file over 60GB.

It's using LAN torrents basically. And he's DL'ing around 3TB-6TB in one night. THAT is a lot.

That is a lot, but it still doesn't justify having his drives in RAID 0. Even a 1Gbps (128 MB/s) network at the theoretical max bandwidth won't use the entire bandwidth of his RAID 0 array. Tell your friend that he needs to reconsider his array and switch to RAID 5. It's way more reliable, for more than enough speed. If a drive ever does die, he can replace and rebuild the array. You CANNOT do that in RAID 0. The entire array is destroyed.

Raid 0 with 12 consumer level drives is insane. He is just asking for trouble and when it happens all his precious data is TOAST. Its risky enough with server level drives. Hell RAID 5 w/ 12 drives is not exactly a great idea either, its better BUT he better have a kick ass controller and online hot spares ready to go when (not IF) a drive dies. He would be better off chopping those drives up into multiple arrays (either 5, 6 or 1+0 in order from worst to best). As I used to explain to people when I was doing CND contracts for HP: you CAN drive down the wrong side of the road...but one day that MAC Truck is going to hit you.

YYMV but RAID 0 is good for certain short term applications where speed is necessary BUT long or even mid term data security is not.

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Actually he did change it, I just talked with him and he changed from 20 1TB's to 12 and now to 8 1.5TB's. He gets around 800-1000 mb/s with those 8. His friend (friend of a friend lol) has 41 1TB drives in one rig. Not sure what RAID he is using though.

Yes RAID 6 would be even better, gives that extra parity bit for security. RAID 1+0 would be insane security lol. He would have almost half the diskspace compared to if he had RAID 6. Pretty crazy stuff. But yes AkG YMMV :)